Schools feel crunch on lunch programs

Food costs hit budgets hard

Eight-year-old twins Rachel (left) and Victoria Shen and their brother, 3-year-old John, ate their lunches at Snug Harbor Elementary School in Quincy yesterday. (Globe Staff Photo / Yoon S. Byun)

The rising cost of grain, milk, and vegetables is expected to drive up school lunch prices this fall for tens of thousands of students, causing even further financial hardships for already-strapped public school systems across Massachusetts, education officials said.

Some of the school systems that will be hit the hardest are the ones trying to offer the healthiest menu choices - fresh fruits and vegetables and other vitamin-rich choices that cost more than the processed fare that marked school lunches of old.

Dozens of districts, such as Brookline, Chelmsford, Quincy, and Marshfield, will increase prices 25 cents to 50 cents this fall in hopes of avoiding a deficit next year.

Tonight, the Boston School Committee will consider a plan to close an estimated $3.8 million deficit in its food service program for this past school year and a projected $6.7 million deficit for the coming year. A district spokes man said the plan is not expected to include a price increase. Rather, it will look at greater efficiencies and encourage more parents to apply for federally subsidized free or reduced-priced meals.

Lunch programs are the latest victims of surging fuel costs that make it more expensive to deliver food. School officials are already seeing the impact of dwindling state local aid dollars and a reluctance on the part of voters to support property tax increases in the form of overrides.

School leaders across the state are concerned that the higher prices could prompt some students from working-class families who don't qualify for federally subsidized meals to skip lunch. They also are concerned that cafeterias could be forced to scale back menus, possibly cutting healthier items because they cost more. Dedham, for example, may stop serving fresh-fruit cups.

"This will be the most difficult year we've had since the early 1980s," when the federal government cut reimbursement rates to local districts to balance its own budget, said Joanne Morrissey, Quincy schools food service director and president of the School Nutrition Association of Massachusetts.

Nationwide, 75 percent of school districts are expected to raise lunch prices this fall, far more than the 30 percent that traditionally raise prices in a given year, according to the national School Nutrition Association. The average national price of a school lunch is expected to be $1.98, a 32-cent increase from this past school year.

"We truly are at a point of crisis," said Katie Wilson, president-elect of the national School Nutrition Association, who last week asked a congressional committee to increase federal assistance and make meals free for all students. "Without proper nutrients, brains don't operate properly. How can you concentrate on calculus when you are so hungry?"

School districts are feeling the pinch after spending the past few years bolstering the nutritional content of lunches amid national concerns about increasing childhood obesity. Many cafeterias no longer fry foods and are offering made-to-order sandwiches, soup and salad bars, whole-grain breads, and more meals made from scratch.

This approach allows schools to better control sodium, sugar, and fat content but requires more labor. But school districts had not expected prices to soar.

Meat costs have risen by 11 percent over this past school year, fruits and vegetables by 13 percent, bread by 17 percent, and milk by 19 percent, according to preliminary results of a meal cost survey conducted this summer by the national School Nutrition Association.

And like many restaurants, cafeterias are moving away from or responding to local bans on trans fats. But alternatives cost more.

"If I wanted to go with frozen bags of vegetables and more prepared products rather than cooking from scratch, could I balance my budget? Yes, but that's not the kind of food the community wants," said Ann Johnson, food service director for Brookline schools, who declined to disclose the amount of the deficit in her approximately $1.5 million annual budget.

Last week, the federal government announced that it would raise its per-meal reimbursement rate for students who qualify for a free meal to $2.57, a 10-cent increase over this past year and one of the highest increases in recent years.

Yet the national school nutrition group says the increase is not enough to cover inflation and the true per-meal cost of $2.88 to prepare a healthy lunch. The group predicts that school nutrition programs could lose about $3.3 million per school day nationwide next school year.

To avoid deficit spending, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education recommends that districts complete a monthly reconciliation of costs, training staff on proper portion sizes and purchasing food through regional collaboratives and the state, which most Greater Boston school districts already do.

In one controversial move, Chelmsford is turning to a private Andover-based company that prepares and sells prepackaged school lunch items in individual servings. The move will save the district about $225,000 next year by eliminating six school food service managers and reducing work hours of the 34 remaining cafeteria workers so many of them no longer qualify for benefits.

But the district, which is reeling from voter rejection this year of a $2.8 million property tax override, will still have to increase lunch prices by 25 cents.

"It's tragic," said Chelmsford's superintendent, Donald Yeoman, noting that many of the laid-off workers had been there for 15 years or longer. "They were great, great people and employees, but my job is to make sure we are in the black, and we have to be efficient."

James Vaznis can be reached at jvaznis@globe.com.